More product

Funny thing - this morning I made a connection in my head between selling my artwork and the work I do with my team at the office. By day, I work for a consulting engineering company - they design and construction roads, bridges, light rail lines, pipelines, restored streams and wetlands, etc. - I help them sell their services and win work. (It's a great job and I work with wonderful people.) At home, in my down time I design and sell artwork on an Etsy site. http://www.redwingblackbird.etsy.com/

In both instances, the classic seller-doer model is in play. You have to sell and do at the same time. At work, for the past 16 years, I've worked only in the seller mode as a marketer. I've watched my engineer and environmental scientist friends struggle with balancing selling (talking to and convincing their clients to use their expertise) and doing (once, sold - designing the project). I never really grasped why its so difficult for them to do both.

Today, my Etsy site is down to a bare minimum of "product," only 9 pieces when I usually strive to have a good 15 - 20 pieces on display. I was so foucsed on selling, that I stopped doing all together. This same thing happens in the office. I find it really hard to be creative, when I'm focused on being a seller. Does selling shut down the creative side? It shouldn't and in fact, it really cannot.

Besides a whole new appreciation for what I'm asking my cohorts to do every day, I have to wonder if there isn't a better way. Bringing a sense of creativity into selling and a sense of selling into the creativity is real the challenge, both in my studio and in my job. Any ideas?

Material inspiration

Caught a fantastic estate sale today and walked away with several very cool pieces of inspiration. My favorite piece is a book titled "The House of Chan Cookbook" by Sou Chan (Doubleday, 1952). It's a wonderful little book of recipes for Chinese-American cuisine. The paper it's printed on will be perfect for decoupage and the recipes are spaced perfectly on the page to allow for interesting paste-ups on the wood pieces. I'm super excited.

Also found some wonderful turn-of-the-last-century maps from old Europe and Africa, a cool book of quotations and proverbs, some great old comic books, and several "Flower and Garden" magazines from the late 50s/early 60s. Really great ads in the old mags, beautiful colors on the old maps, and really fun artwork in the comic books. My exacto knife will be busy over the next few days!

Finishing up, posting and moving on

Yesterday I photographed the frames. This sounds like an easy part of the process, but it's tricky. I built a simple lightbox from instructions on the web. This time I had abundant natural sunlight to light up most of the box, so the pictures turned out a little different. I usually snap about 25 or 30 pictures per piece, in order to get five good shots that I can use on the Etsy site.

Once the pictures are taken, there is a little photoshop enhancement involved. Mostly that's cropping, resizing and adjusting colors, but sometimes it's completely re-doing the shot. With five good images, I move on to writing the descriptions. In these two cases, I went with simple descriptive sentences and a little fun.

Posting items on Etsy is incredibly easy. Each item gets about 28 words worth of "tags" that help people find the art. Some are materials and some tags are just simply key word tags. I've found that the more creative the tags, the easier it is for other Etsy retailers to find my pieces for Etsy treasuries.

With these two new frames posted, and two pieces of art sold today, I'm turning my attention back to the headboard, mirror and one custom ordered piece. It will be a fun summer. :)

Progress

Well, two things finally got me off my butt and back to work on these frames. First, I had a buyer give me some amazing and glowing praise for some work. It is amazing how kind words can really motivate you, isn't it? Second, I made a check list and this is the last thing on the list "finish nat park frames and post them." I'm headed out of town for a conference next week and my studio is a mess. I need to complete at least one project before I head out, these frames are it. The picture shows them coated with polyurethane and drying nicely on my picnic table.

I've also started a quick additional series of frames with some old vintage dominos, playing cards and some vintage Vegas postcards. So much for a tidier studio next week. :)